Monday, December 31, 2007

This video is nowhere as pervy as the title makes it sound. Rather it's a visually dull tape of a 10-year-old Japanese girl rocking out a solo keyboard version of Kansas' "Carry On My Wayward Son". Impressive!

Sunday, December 16, 2007

I was recently musing about Microsoft's weird double-standards with regards to consumer-punishing digital rights management (DRM), but after reading this item it occurred to me that they've actually stumbled into an hat trick of contradictions.

As the linked article discusses, M$ has a pair of incompatible DRM schemes for their own Zune and players designed to run the previous PlaysForSure-protected content. Now they've rebranded both schemes into something even more confusing and likely to lead to customer dissatisfaction. Real f*cking bright, Redmond.

That stupidity has been going on for a year now, but where it gets weird is that the Fall Update for the Xbox 360 has added the capability to play back DivX and Xvid compressed files. So what? Well, the main source of these files are movies and TV shows being trading online. Isn't it contradictory to be so wrapped up in providing onerous DRM crap that you screw your former partners and the people who buy your hardware with incompatible schemes then turn around and make your game and media console work with pirated content?

I've watched "The Simpsons Movie", some anime and an episode of "Pushing Daisies"that my g/f and I missed viewing live, but I didn't want to watch on washed-out tape. A few hours after it had aired, I was able to pull it down off BitTorrent with the commercials chopped out and everything. While it didn't look as good as the HD broadcast would've, it was fine. Thanks to the update from DRM-crazed Microsoft, more "pirated" content will surely flow thru their system.

How is it that with such boneheaded moves on M$'s part, Apple is still sucking wind in comparison? Easy. As bad as M$ is, Apple is far worse in abusing their battered customers and those who aren't caught in the reality distortion field of Lord Jobs take one look at their pretty, but vacant, claptrap and flee.

Saturday, December 15, 2007

I was just watching the cute American Express ad with Tina Fey - MILF!!! - touting their suspicious charge protection service. They call her up about 14,000 racket balls and take the charge off. I've had calls from Visa when I bought something really pricey from eBay, but in my experience AmEx was far less on their game.

It started when I went to Costco to get gas and had my card rejected. Huh? Another AmEx card worked fine, so I gassed up and went home to call them. The CSR said that there was a suspected fraud hold on it and that they'd take it off. Flash-forward a week and once again the card is being declined. It took two calls to India and a total trashing of my schedule to get it sorted out. No explanation as to why what I was told the prior week was inoperable. The security guy was pretty ill-tempered, too.

Jump ahead a month and I happened to look at my balance statement e-mail and say I owed over $4000! Whiskey Tango Foxtrot?!?!? I gave them a call after checking my online statement and asked them how they didn't notice what appeared to be me on a tear of $400+ charges at what appeared to be Italian restaurants while ducking back home to get a tank of gas at Costco in the middle of this trip?

They didn't have an answer for that, but removed the charges and killed the card, issuing a new one. Extra problem was that all the stuff I had automatically billed to that card suddenly wasn't getting paid, pissing off those businesses. My financial tracking program is jacked up, too. Thanks, AmEx!!

Today's Religion of Peace update comes from the suburbs of Toronto where a "devout Muslim father" honor-killed his pretty 16-year-old daughter for refusing to wear the hijab, the Muslim head scarf the sexist barbaric medieval faith demands their women wear.

The girl's friends, meanwhile, told local media she was having trouble at home because she did not conform to the family's religious beliefs and refused to wear a traditional Islamic head scarf, or hijab.

"She wanted to go different ways than her family wanted to go, and she wanted to make her own path, but he (her father) wouldn't let her," one of her classmates told public broadcaster CBC.

"She loved clothes," another of her friends, Dominiquia Holmes-Thompson, told the daily Toronto Star. "She just wanted to show her beauty ... She just wanted to dress like us, just like a normal person."

Her older brother also interfered with the investigation, so his daughters (if and when he has some) better not know about what happened to their aunt if they want to get a good night's sleep.

A TV news piece about this is here and while you watch it keep in mind that according to the media's conventional wisdom the Catholic Church is the most anti-female religion because it doesn't ordain women as priests.

I don't have any tattoos. There simply isn't anything important enough that I need it permanently inscribed onto my flesh. I don't have a problem with people who have intricately-done artistic tats, but waaaaaay too many people get stupid flash like the Tasmanian Devil or big, black "tribal" tattoos. That just announces, "I'm an idiot." before they open their noise holes.

The next level of dumb tattoos are the Asian characters people get. Some forgotten sitcom a couple years back played on this with a big macho black dude saying that it meant "fierce warrior" only to learn from the Chinese food delivery man that it really meant "He who lays with other men." Har-har.

A friend and his wife have several tattoos, but the kicker was when they got the Chinese figures for "man" and "woman" on the backs of their necks. I leaned over to Hermione and said, "Wouldn't it be funny if they actual said "asshole" and "slut"? (Note: It's a "Rocky Horror Picture Show" reference, not a commentary on their characters.)

What brings this up is this story about a dumb girl in love who decided to get her boyfriend du jour's name - they're now broken up; HA! - tattooed on her tummy only to learn that it actually meant "supermarket". Har-har^2.

I don't mean to disturb you, but could you PLEASE see it in your kindness to not have Jessica's life go down the crapper like Britney Spears' after she threw it all away to breed with some.......civilian? We'd appreciate it down here.

...to honor Christmas and the Christian faith. The vote shocked Capitol Hill observers because votes on similar resolutions honoring the holidays of Islam and Hinduism passed without any NO votes.

Appearing this morning on the Fox News Channel’s Fox and Friends, King said, “I would like to know how they could vote Yes on Islam, Yes on the Indian Religions and No on Christianity when the foundation of this nation and our American culture is Christianity…I think there’s an assault on Christianity in America.”

None of the nine voted against resolutions honoring the Islamic holiday of Ramadan and the Hindu holiday of Diwali.

So they don't have a problem supporting the blood-thirsty faith that seeks to slit their throats and Hindus - hey, Quik-E Mart owners need prayers, right? - by the religion that put the "Christ" into Christmas is where they stand up and express their contempt for religion. Nice. I'm sure they'll be in their offices on Dec. 25th. [snort]

My pal McHatin sent this link along and I was wondering where it was going at first, since it was doing little to dispell the "white people can't dance" meme. Stick with it. What appears to be the blooper actually sets up the payoff. I foresee a healthy marriage for these two if they're willing to take the piss out of stodgy tradition like this. Mazel tov!

Tuesday, December 11, 2007

Last March I posted about an employee at Costco I'd dubbed "Supermodel Cashier". I haven't seen her in the past month or so during visits on different days of the week. Since many of the employees there have been there since Costco came into the area in 1998 and turnover is low, maybe she finally got discovered. I wonder...

Monday, December 10, 2007

Because Evangelicals are acting like a one-note herd of clueless paranoiacs about Mitt Romney's Mormon faith, he had to give a speech last week explaining to the holy rollers and atheists that he's not like Tom Cruise or whatever.

Hermione and I have had a long-running hobby of ascribing various levels of sexual deviancy (or lack thereof) to the various clerks, cashiers, waitresses and whatnots we encounter. Tonight, while leaving Blockbuster, she asked, "What do you think he does for kicks?" After about .47 seconds of thought, I replied, "Goes home and watches alien tentacle porn. That hentai anime stuff that makes Godzilla want to keep stomping the place." She agreed with my astute judgment.

If a girl seems quiet and reserved, "She's never had an orgasm." or "She's totally wild. She's into stuff that's illegal in Muslim cultures or states south of Ohio." Guys get it just as bad, too. "Dude drives a black-and-gold Trans Am." or the now-classic description I had for a poet who was freaking out the audience with his creepy, misogynistic orations, "Why am I getting the image of several meat freezers in his basement filled with the bodies of missing prostitutes?"

Is this making rash personal judgments about people based on the most superficial criterion; judging a book by its cover in the most shallow way? Hell, yes it is!!! Duh!!! It's not like we're denying them a mortgage or slashing their tires or anything actually harmful. Heck, they're probably doing the exact same thing about us! "That poor girl. How can she stand that asshole?" or "He's hot. I ought to knife that bitch and show him what real poonannie is like. Ya feel me?"

If you don't do so already - yeah, right, you don't - take more than a cursory glance at your service industry worker and take a guess as to what they're like when they take off that name tag and uniform. Try and imagine what they're like off the clock and on the town. As mean-spirited as this activity may seem, it actually makes you take more notice of those folks whom we take for granted every day. Perhaps that janitor cleaning the bathroom is an excellent salsa dancer. It's SOP to ignore people beneath our station - or what we think our lofty station is - so by being "mean", we can actually be kinder than those who think service people's only purpose is to serve us.

Thursday, December 06, 2007

Why It Sucks: Taken over by an evil symbiote, Peter Parker finds himself doing dastardly deeds we never thought possible, including acting emo, asking for cookies (with nuts in them), and worst of all, playing jazz piano while for some reason looking almost exactly like the lesbian musician K.D. Lang.

Monday, December 03, 2007

Liberal elites love to prattle on about how much smarter they are than "Red State Bubbas" and gasp in near-orgasmic rapture over the enlightened status the French have over crass Americans. Whatever. (They never seem to move to the Continent, do they? Johnny Depp excepted.)

Anyhoo, check out this clip from the French version of "Who Wants To Be a Millionaire?" in which Froggy is stumped by the question, "What revolves around the Earth?"

I'm not sure which is worse: that the John Kerry-looking dolt didn't know the answer or that 56% precent of the audience thought it was the Sun. (2% thought it was Mars!) These people are able to have nuclear power plants with this level of scientific knowledge?